Mobile communications has changed the way people communicate and mobile phones have been transformed from a luxury item to an essential part of every day life. While voice connections fulfill the basic need to communicate, and mobile voice connections continue to filter even further into the fabric of every day life, the mobile Internet is the next step in the mobile communication revolution. The mobile Internet is poised to become a common source of everyday information, and easy, versatile mobile access to this data will be taken for granted.
Third generation (3G) cellular networks have been specifically designed to fulfill these future demands of the mobile Internet. As these services grow in popularity and usage, factors such as cost efficient optimization of network capacity and quality of service (QoS) will become even more essential to cellular operators than it is today. These factors may be achieved with careful network planning and operation, improvements in transmission methods, and advances in receiver techniques. To this end, carriers need technologies that will allow them to increase downlink throughput and, in turn, offer advanced QoS capabilities and speeds that rival those delivered by cable modem and/or DSL service providers. In this regard, networks based on wideband CDMA (WCDMA) technology may make the delivery of data to end users a more feasible option for today's wireless carriers.
However, implementing advanced wireless technologies such as WCDMA and/or HSDPA may still require overcoming some architectural hurdles. For example, the RAKE receiver is the most commonly used receiver in CDMA systems, mainly due to its simplicity and reasonable performance. A RAKE receiver contains a bank of spreading sequence correlators, each receiving an individual multipath. A RAKE receiver operates on multiple discrete paths. The received multipath signals may be combined in several ways, from which maximum ratio combining (MRC) is preferred in a coherent receiver. However, a RAKE receiver may be suboptimal in many practical systems. For example, its performance may degrade from multiple access interference (MAI), that is, interference induced by other users in the network.
In the case of a WCDMA downlink, MAI may result from intercell and intracell interference. The signals from neighboring base stations compose intercell interference, which is characterized by scrambling codes, channels and angles of arrivals different from the desired base station signal. Spatial equalization may be utilized to suppress inter-cell interference. In a synchronous downlink application, employing orthogonal spreading codes, intracell interference may be caused by multipath propagation. In some instances, intracell interference may comprise inter-path interference (IPI). IPI may occur when one or more paths, or RAKE “fingers,” interfere with other paths within the RAKE receiver. Due to the non-zero cross-correlation between spreading sequences with arbitrary time shifts, interference occurs between propagation paths (or RAKE fingers) after despreading, causing MAI. The level of intracell interference depends strongly on the channel response. In nearly flat fading channels, the physical channels remain almost completely orthogonal and intra-cell interference does not have any significant impact on the receiver performance. On the other hand, the performance of the RAKE receiver may be severely deteriorated by intra-cell interference in frequency selective channels. Frequency selectivity is common for the channels in WCDMA networks.
Due to the difficulties faced when non-linear channel equalizers are applied to a WCDMA downlink, detection of the desired physical channels with a non-linear equalizer may result in implementing an interference canceller or optimal multi-user receiver. Both types of receivers may be prohibitively complex for mobile terminals and may require information not readily available at the mobile terminal. Alternatively, the total base station signal may be considered as the desired signal. However, non-linear equalizers rely on prior knowledge of the constellation of the desired signal, and this information is not readily available at the WCDMA terminal. The constellation of the total base station signal, that is, sum of all physical channels, may be a high order quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) constellation with uneven spacing. The spacing of the constellation changes constantly due to transmission power control (TPC) and possible power offsets between the control data fields, time-multiplexed to the dedicated physical channels. The constellation order may also frequently change due to discontinuous transmission. This makes an accurate estimation of the constellation very difficult.
In this regard, the use of multiple transmit and/or receive antennas may result in an improved overall system performance. These multi-antenna configurations, also known as smart antenna techniques, may be utilized to mitigate the negative effects of multipath and/or signal interference on signal reception. It is anticipated that smart antenna techniques may be increasingly utilized both in connection with the deployment of base station infrastructure and mobile subscriber units in cellular systems to address the increasing capacity demands being placed on those systems. These demands arise, in part, from a shift underway from current voice-based services to next-generation wireless multimedia services that provide voice, video, and data communication.
The utilization of multiple transmit and/or receive antennas is designed to introduce a diversity gain and to suppress interference generated within the signal reception process. Such diversity gains may improve system performance by increasing received signal-to-noise ratio, by providing more robustness against signal interference, and/or by permitting greater frequency reuse for higher capacity. In communication systems that incorporate multi-antenna receivers, a set of M receive antennas may be utilized to null the effect of (M−1) interferers, for example. Accordingly, N signals may be simultaneously transmitted in the same bandwidth using N transmit antennas, with the transmitted signal then being separated into N respective signals by way of a set of N antennas deployed at the receiver. Systems that utilize multiple transmit and receive antennas may be referred to as multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. One attractive aspect of multi-antenna systems, in particular MIMO systems, is the significant increase in system capacity that may be achieved by utilizing these transmission configurations. For a fixed overall transmitted power, the capacity offered by a MIMO configuration may scale with the increased signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). For example, in the case of fading multipath channels, a MIMO configuration may increase system capacity by nearly M additional bits/cycle for each 3-dB increase in SNR.
However, the widespread deployment of multi-antenna systems in wireless communications, particularly in wireless handset devices, has been limited by the increased cost that results from increased size, complexity, and power consumption. Providing a separate RF chain for each transmit and receive antenna is a direct factor that increases the cost of multi-antenna systems. As the number of transmit and receive antennas increases, the system complexity, power consumption, and overall cost may increase. In addition, conventional methods of signal processing at the receiver side of a wireless communication system do not take into account outside interference as well as IPI resulting within a multipath fading environment. This poses problems for mobile system designs and applications.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.